Via The News Blog comes this charming tale.
Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer had this to say on Skeptic magazine's podcast, Skepticality, regarding religion versus science:
A lot of people say things like, "scientists are always changing their minds"; "science keeps changing" like it's a weakness. But that's science's strength...the fact that religion doesn't change--that they pride themselves on not changing their dogma...if you don't bend, you're going to break.
Even on the subject of religious dogma, why are the religious so off-base? This article hits the target dead on (emphasis mine; scroll down to the heading entitled "Sex Talk"):
On the other hand, look at how much energy many religions put into discussing sex. Although there are a lot of Biblical condemnations of sexual sin, some simple word counts will show that there are at least as many condemnations of economic injustice. A search of the New International Version found 79 occurrences of “adultery” and its variants. “Prostitute” and its variants occurs 74 times, but the majority of those verses refer not to sexual sin but to religious apostasy. On the other hand we find 126 occurrences of “oppress.” “Steal” and its variants occur 50 times and “rob” 28 times. “Poor” occurs 178 times. So why don’t we hear a lot more sermons about, oh, cheating on taxes and expense accounts than cheating on spouses? Or more sermons about the evils of poverty than pornography? Why does homosexuality, mentioned directly only a couple of times in the Bible, merit so much more attention than cheating the poor, which is mentioned dozens of times?
